The Golden Dome Award, established by the Alumnae Association in 1990, is presented to an alumna for whom the members of the Association have high regard and whose efforts through continuous service and resultant achievement have advanced Marymount College as an institution.

The daughter of two teachers, Diane Kollar Monticone traveled to Europe for the first time with her parents when she was 15 and soon became a lifelong devotee of France and its language.

She applied to Marymount College after learning about its Junior Year Abroad Program, and in 1960, she and nine fellow Marymount students traveled to Paris for study abroad. Diane attended the Cours de Civilisation Française at the Sorbonne and was awarded the degre supérieur after two semesters of study.

Upon graduation in 1962, she became an assistant in the language laboratory at Marymount College, Arlington, Va., and pursued a master's degree in French and linguistics at the School of Languages and Linguistics of Georgetown University.

In 1963, she began her career at the College of Saint Elizabeth in Morristown, N.J., where she was member of the faculty until her retirement in 2000. As professor of foreign languages, Diane was responsible for teaching all the major courses in French as well as culture, literature, and civilization courses in English.

In 1980, she received a Ph.D. in French from Rutgers University. She published a book titled Montesquieu and His Reader, a study of de l'esprit des lois (spirit of the laws) in 1989.

An active member of the Alliance Française of Bergen County for more than 30 years, she has served as vice president, secretary, treasurer, and a member of its board of directors.

She currently spends winters in Florida, where she started a program at the Delray Beach Library to teach English to Haitian women. Her husband, Ronald, is a retired professor of political science at the City University of New York. Diane has two children (one of whom is a Fordham graduate) and three grandchildren.